By RONG REN
Politics Correspondent
BEIJING (China Daily Show) – An explosive 15-minute speech at the 18th National Party Congress by President Hu Jintao, laying out an explicit vision of reform in soaring rhetoric, had to be abruptly cancelled after Hu left it in his car.
Unable to find the lost notes, Hu was forced to substitute his potentially seismic remarks with a one-and-a-half-hour work report, sources say.
“Hu was pretty disappointed, as he had hoped to make substantive reform his key political legacy and thus secure his place in China’s history, instead of simply being remembered as yet another heartless technocrat in a business suit and a bad hair-job,” his personal assistant, Lin Tao, explained. “Unfortunately, he left the damn speech in his limo. What can you do?”
A precise timetable of legal, political and economic change, expressed in words of near-lyrical inspirational prose, was instead replaced by a rambling list of achievements laid out in bland officialese, while a blistering critique of the culture of corruption and materialism that has become endemic in all levels of government had to be swapped out for a 25-minute explanation of Jiang Zemin Theory.
Lin said it wasn’t all bad news for the outgoing President, however.
“Luckily, we don’t think anybody realized, except maybe Jiang Zemin, and the whole thing passed off without a hitch,” said Lin. “OK, China may have missed the opportunity to reform itself but the important thing is, no one lost face.”
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